Guest Author • Oct 23, 2021 •
By Paul Callister and Robert McLachlan Electric aircraft have arrived, but a lot has to happen to make commercial flights a reality. Can they live up to the hype, and can they reduce aviation emissions? We run the numbers. It’s not easy to keep up with the rapidly-changing world of electric aircraft. It can look like a blizzard of … Read More
Guest Author • Oct 19, 2021 •
Dan Lowry, GNS Science; Mario Krapp, GNS Science, and Nick Golledge, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Rising seas are already making storm damage more costly, adding to the impact on about 700 million people who live in low-lying coastal areas at risk of flooding. Scientists expect sea-level rise will exacerbate the damage from storm … Read More
Guest Author • Oct 04, 2021 •
Taha Yasseri, University College Dublin and Mary Sanford, University of Oxford Ten years ago, when we ranked the most controversial articles on Wikipedia, George W. Bush was at the top of the list with global warming at number five. The article on global warming has now been re-titled as climate change, but this remains among the … Read More
Guest Author • Oct 01, 2021 •
João Marcos Azevedo Correia de Souza, MetService — Te Ratonga Tirorangi; Amandine Schaeffer, UNSW; Jonathan Gardner, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, and Robert Smith The ocean around New Zealand is getting warmer, and extreme warming events have become more frequent over the past years. These marine heatwaves can have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems. When they … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 29, 2021 •
Climate explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz What is an ice age? Do they have to last a certain amount of time to count, … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 23, 2021 •
Friederike Otto, University of Oxford and Luke Harrington, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Tropical Storm Ida recently left a path of devastation across the US, capping a summer beset by wildfires, heatwaves and floods which broke records around the world. The inevitable question after each of these extreme weather events is the same: to what extent … Read More
Robert Hickson • Sep 21, 2021 •
The nature, scale, and pace of change is central to futures work. But usually more attention is given to identifying what’s happening rather than what needs to happen. Are we living in fast times? Many futures studies focus on how fast the world is changing now. Partly that seems to be a marketing strategy – who’s going … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 16, 2021 •
Julian Koplin, The University of Melbourne and Christopher Gyngell, The University of Melbourne US startup Colossal Biosciences has announced plans to bring woolly mammoths, or animals like them, back from extinction and into the frosty landscape of the Siberian tundra. Colossal has received US$15 million in initial funds to support research conducted by Harvard geneticist George … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 08, 2021 •
Sara Ryding, Deakin University and Matthew Symonds, Deakin University Global warming is a big challenge for warm-blooded animals, which must maintain a constant internal body temperature. As anyone who’s experienced heatstroke can tell you, our bodies become severely stressed when we overheat. Animals are dealing with global warming in various ways. Some move to cooler areas, such as … Read More
Guest Author • Sep 01, 2021 •
Tom Womack, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Marine organisms found in New Zealand’s past and present coastal waters. Tom Womack, CC BY-ND New Zealand may be relatively small, but its fossil record reveals a globally important ecological relationship between the number of species, their role in the ecosystem and ocean temperatures. We used New Zealand’s exemplary fossil … Read More